Life In the Heights
Crime data from the Cleveland Heights Police Department for the first seven months of 2015 indicate a positive trend is continuing, as year-to-year crime rates declined in all but two categories. The only categories that didn’t show a decrease in the number of crimes were murder and rape. Through July of this year, there has […]
Saturday, October 10th at the Cleveland Botanical Garden marked the Western Reserve Herb Society’s 70th Annual Herb Fair. A celebration of herbs in all forms and varieties was on display with a myriad of activities (make your own herb vinegars and meat rubs) to delicious baked goods and exquisite jams for sale. It was a […]
Heights Community Congress (HCC), founded in 1972, is Greater Cleveland, Ohio’s oldest fair housing enforcement organization. For over four decades HCC has been conducting audits of the real estate industry to expose and discourage racial steering and disparate treatment of African American and white home seekers. Each September, HCC organizes a home and garden tour […]
Yesterday Ohio’s elected, Republican-dominated supreme court ruled that a privately held, for-profit charter management company, White Hat Management, owns the equipment and assets of several White Hat Hope Academies and Life Skills Academies that had sought to sever ties with White Hat and hire a new management company to run the schools. White Hat is […]
In August, 2014, the Cleveland Heights Police Department inaugurated the Citizens Police Academy and accepted the first cohort of students. The Academy was part of Chief Jeffrey Robertson’s desire to deepen mutual understanding and regard between the department and the Cleveland Heights community. He considered the Citizens Police Academy as an opportunity for citizens to […]
Things unraveled pretty quickly last week for David Hansen, the director of school choice at the Ohio Department of Education. On Tuesday, the State Board of Education, dominated by appointees of Republican Governor John Kasich, met and discussed why, as Ohio began to evaluate the sponsor-authorizers of Ohio’s charter schools, the test scores of students […]
The water system in Cleveland Heights is in need of significant repair, estimated at $20 million. It also owes more than $3 million to the Cleveland Water Department, which supplies water to Cleveland Heights through a “master meter” (i.e. Cleveland Heights pays for all the water it uses, and then distributes the water to residents […]
The headline on Doug Livingston’s piece in the Akron Beacon Journal, says it all: Ohio Lawmakers Scrap Elected School Boards and Union Contracts, Usher In Private Control After Barring Opposition Testimony. Livingston explains: “The bill began innocuously in the House as an effort to help communities turn schools into comprehensive learning centers for the neighborhood. […]
States like my own state of Ohio that assign letter grades (A-F) to schools and school districts base these rankings pretty much on the standardized test scores of the students. Test scores—with high school graduation rates sometimes added to the algorithm that determines the grade—are understood as the way to measure school quality. The “A” […]
